After these events. King Ahhashverosh promoted Haman,1 son of Hamdatha the Agagite, son of Stench, son of Robbery, son of Pilate, son of Lysius, son of Florus, son of Fadus, son of Flaccus, son of Antipater, son of Herod, son of Refuse, son of Decay, son of Parmashta, son of Vajasatha, son of Agag, son of the Red, son of Amalek, son of the concubine of Eliphaz, the eldest son of Esau. He made him great, and placed him upon a throne higher than all his nobles and ministers.

And all the servants of the king who sat at the gate of the royal palace bowed down and prostrated themselves before Haman, because the king had commanded it; but Mordecai did not kneel before him, nor salute him.

Then the servants of the king who sat at the gate of the royal palace said to Mordecai: "What privilege hast thou above us, that we should make obeisance before Haman, and that thou shouldst not kneel before him? Why dost thou transgress the command of the king?"

Mordecai answered and said to them: "You are foolish, and without understanding! Hear me, and tell me, you hypocrites (or coal blacks), Where is there a man who dares to be so proud and haughty? He a man born of a woman, and his duration but a few days! He who at his birth weeps and cries, in his youth mourns and sighs, and during all his days is full of trouble and vexation, and at last returns to his dust! And shall I kneel before him?

Never! I only bow before the one great and living God in heaven, who is a consuming fire and whose angels are fire, who holds the earth in His arm, who spread out the heavens by His mighty power, who by His will makes the sun to be darkness and the darkness to be light, who by His wisdom surrounded the ocean with sand, provided the sea with odorous salt and with banks, keeping the waves bound in the deep as with chains that they should not overflow the land and not pass their limit. By His word He created the firmament and spread it as a cloud in the air, yea. He spread it as a vapour upon the world, and a tent upon the surface of the earth, and by His power He carries the things that are above and below. Before Him the sun, the moon, and the Pleiades run their course, and the stars and planets are not for a moment inactive. None of them rest, but all run before Him as His messengers, who go right and left to do His will. To Him who created them belongs praise, and before Him one must bow."

They replied to Mordecai: "Nevertheless, one of thy fathers bowed before one of the fathers of Haman!"

"Who was it," exclaimed Mordecai, "who bowed before the ancestor of Haman?"

They rejoined, "Was it not thy father Jacob who bowed before his brother Esau, the ancestor of Haman?"

He in reply said, "I am of the posterity of Benjamin,1 and when Jacob bowed before Esau, Benjamin was not yet born, and he never in all his life bowed before a man. Hence an eternal covenant was made with him while he was yet in his mother's womb, until the time that Israel shall go up to their land and build the temple in his territory, and that the Shechinah shall dwell in his border, and that all Israel shall rejoice there, and that the nations shall bow and prostrate themselves in his land. But I shall not bow before the wicked Haman, this enemy!"

Day by day they thus spake to him, and he did not hearken to them. They then reported him to Haman, to see whether the words of Mordecai will stand, in that he told them that he was a Jew.

When Haman saw that Mordecai refused to bow before him, he was full of wrath against him.

But he was too despicable an object in his eyes to lay violent hands on him alone, and he wanted rather to destroy all those Jews who were sojourning in the empire of Ahhashverosh.

In the first month, which is the month Nisan, in the twelfth year of the reign of Ahhashverosh, he cast the lot,Elided passage Included passage

And Haman spake to King Ahhashverosh: "There is a certain people of the Jews, scattered and thrown about among the nations in all the provinces of the empire; they are proud and haughty, they bathe in Tebeth in tepid water, and in Tamuz they sit in cold baths. They practise laws and customs which are different from those of every other nation and country, and do not walk according to our laws, nor have pleasure in our customs, nor do they serve the king. When they see us they spit on the ground, and consider us in the light of an unclean thing. When we go to them and order them to do some service to the king, then they jump down the walls, break down the fences, and make their escape through the gaps. When we try to catch them, they turn round and stand staring at us, gnash with their teeth, stamp with their feet, and so frighten us that we are not able to take hold of them. We do not marry their daughters, and they do not marry ours. Is any of them taken for the service of the king, he passes the day in idleness, with all kinds of excuses, such as to-day is the Sabbath, to-day is Passover. The day on which they want to buy from us they call a lawful day, and the day on which we want to buy something from them they call an unlawful day, and they close the market for us.

In the first hour of the day they say, 'We must read the Shema' (Deut. vi. 4); in the second hour they say, 'We must pray;' in the third, 'We must eat,' in the fourth they say, 'We must thank the God of heaven for having given us bread and water.' In the fifth they go out for a walk. In the sixth they come back. In the seventh they go to meet their wives, who say to them, 'Here is some soup to refresh you after the heavy toil which the tyrannical king put on you.' One day in the week they keep as a day of rest, in which they go to their synagogues, read in their books, interpret their prophets, curse our king, imprecate our rulers, and say: 'This is the seventh day, on which the great God rested.'

Their unclean wives go after seven days, in the middle of the night, and defile the water. On the eighth day they circumcise their sons, without any pity upon them, in order, as they say, thereby to differ from other nations. Thirty days they call a month, and they say one month is complete and another is defective.

In the month of Nisan they keep a feast, lasting eight days, when they remove and burn everything that is leaven, and cleanse their utensils, and say, 'This is the day in which our fathers were redeemed from Egypt;' and they call this day Passover, and go to their synagogues, read their books, interpret their prophets, curse the king, imprecate the governors, and say, 'Like the leaven is removed from that which is unleavened, so may the kingdom of the tyrant be removed from among us, and so may we be delivered from this foolish king.'

In the month Sivan they keep a feast of two days, in which they go into their synagogues, read the Shema, pray, read their law, interpret their prophets, curse the king, imprecate the governors, and call it the day of convocation.1They then go up to the roof of the house of their God, and throw down pomegranates and apples, and then collect them, and say, 'Like as we gather these pomegranates and apples, so may their sons be gathered out from amongst us.' They also say, 'This is the day in which the Law was given to our fathers on Mount Sinai.'

A certain time they call new year, viz. the first of Tishri, in which they go to their synagogues, read their books, interpret their prophets, curse the king, imprecate the governors, blow the trumpets, and say, 'On this day the remembrance of our fathers comes up before our Father in heaven. May our remembrance conduce to our good, and that of our enemies conduce to their evil.'

On the ninth of the same month they slaughter geese and animals, eat and drink sumptuously—they, their wives, their sons, and their daughters.

The tenth of this month they call a great fast day, on which they, their wives, and their sons and daughters fast; and they harass even their children and sucklings, without pity upon them, and they say, 'On this day are our sins atoned, yea, our sins are collected and added to the sins of our enemies.' They go to their synagogues, read their books, interpret their prophets, curse the king, imprecate the governors, and say, 'May this foolish kingdom be blotted out from the world;' and they pray and supplicate that the king may die, and that his government may be destroyed.

On the fifteenth day of the same month they erect booths on the roofs of their houses, then they go into our orchards, cut down our palm leaves, pluck down our citrons, break our willows (or spice trees), destroy our gardens and our fences with- out any pity, and then they make of the branches hosannas, and say, 'As the king does among the arrayed army, so do we.' Then they go to their synagogues, read their books, pray, rejoice, go around with their hosannas, jump and dance like goats, and we do not know whether they curse or bless us. They call this feast the Feast of Tabernacles, and do not perform the work of the king, saying to us, 'This is a forbidden day.' Thus they spend the year, with the excuse of 'Sheehy, Pheehy,' i.e. 'To-day is a Sabbath, to-day is a feast.'1

Fifty years they call a jubilee; seven years, a jubilee week twelve months, a year; thirty days, a month;

the seventh day they call a day of rest, and they keep it as a feast day, in which the Lord of the universe rested.

When their kingdom was yet standing, there arose a king among them whose name was David, who harboured thoughts of evil against us, and wished to kill us and to exterminate us from the world. Two parts of us he killed and rooted out, and one part he left. Yet of those he left he made servants. As it is written: 'And he measured them with the line, making them to lie down on the ground' (2 Sam. viii. 2).

After him rose up one of the kings who were thy predecessors; his name was Nebuchadnezzar, and he went against them, destroyed their temple, plundered their city, and led them into captivity, and still they are high-spirited and have not given up their haughtiness till now, but say: 'We are the children of renowned fathers, and we have never subjected ourselves nor bowed to kings, neither have we obeyed governors.' They send letters to every place, asking for prayers to God that the king may die, and that our rule may be destroyed; and this they do without our knowledge.

When their forefathers came down to Egypt they were only seventy persons, but when they went up (out of Egypt) they were sixty myriads.

And even now, though they are likewise in captivity, and have nothing, yet they say: 'We are the children of pious and good people.' But, in fact, there is not a more poor and faulty people in the world than they are. This people is in all the towns; some of them are dealers in wax1 and candle provisioners, and some of them are great men. Everything they sell, they sell at an overcharged price, and everything they buy, they do not pay its value;

Included passage they do not observe the laws and ordinances of the king, and the king has no advantage in tolerating them or in allowing them to exist.

If it please the king, let him write an order for their extermination,Elided passage Included passage

Then the king took off his ring from his hand and gave it to Haman, son of Hamdatha the Agagite, the oppressor of the Jews.

And the king said to Haman: "The money is given to thee, and the people too, to do with them as it seems best in thy sight." But thou, Ahhashverosh, hast neither acted like a buyer nor like a seller, for a buyer gives money and a seller takes money; but thou hast given thy ring to Haman, and hast said to him: "Thy money is given thee and the people, to do with them as it seems best in thy sight." In thee is the verse verified which says: "As a ring of gold in a swine's snout (Prov. xi. 22). As rings do not befit swine, so the kingdom does not befit thee, and thou art like a beautiful woman of bad morals."

Then the scribes of the king were called together on the thirteenth day of the month Nisan, and everything which Haman commanded concerning the Jews was written down, for all the dignitaries of the king, and for all the great men in every province, and for the rulers of every people. In the writing and language of each country and people it was written in the name of King Ahhashverosh and sealed with the royal seal.

And letters were sent by swift messengers to all the provinces of the king to destroy, to kill, and to exterminate all the Jews, from boys to old men, infants and women in one day, namely, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month Adar, and also to plunder their houses.

The writing was explained, and its object was revealed and published to all the nations in every province, that they should be prepared for that day.

All this happened that thou (reader) mayest know that God never fails to punish with measure for measure. You have seen that because the brethren of Joseph sold him into a strange land, therefore their descendants were likewise sold into a strange land; but as Benjamin did not take part in this transaction with his brethren, for that reason two of his descendants, viz. Mordecai and Esther, became redeemers of Israel.

The swift messengers hastened on with the decree of the king, and it was also published in the capital Shushan, while the king and Haman sat down to eat and to drink, and the city of Shushan was in a state of lamentation.